Chapter 1: Embrace Reality and Deal With It

1. I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being bale to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.
2. Knowing that I could be painfully wrong and curiosity about why other smart people saw things differently prompted me to look at things through the eyes of others as well as my own.
3. Time is like a river that carries us forward into encounters with reality that require us to make decisions. We can't stop our movement down this river and we can't avoid those encounters. We can only approach them in the best possible way.
4. You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don't you won't know if these things can happen to you and, if they do, you won't know how to deal with them.
5. Timing is everything.
6. I learned (again) that no matter how much I knew and how hard I worked, I could never be certain enough to proclaim things like what I'd said Wall $treet Week.
7. Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another , we all have to make.
8. I learned to go slowly when faced with the choice between two things that you need that are seemingly at adds. That way you can figure out how to have as much of both as possible. THere is almost always a good path that you just haven't discovered yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.
9. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.
10. Bad times coupled with good reflections provide some of the best lessons, and not just about business but also baout relationships.
11. Having an ability to figure things out is more important than having specific knowledge of how to do something.
12. Making a handful of good uncorrelated bets that are balanced and leveraged well is the surest way of having a lot of upside without being exposed to unacceptable downside.
13. My encounters were tests of my character and creativity.
14. Over time, I came to appreciate what a tiny and short-lived part of that remarkable system I am, and how it's both good for me and good for the system for me to know how to interact with it well.
15. Instead of feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, I saw pain as nature's reminder that there is something important for me to learn.
16. Since life brings both ups and downs, struggling well doesn't just make your ups better; it makes your downs less bad.
17. The happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it.
18. It's now clear to me that my purpose, your purpose, and the purpose of everything else is to evolve and to contribute to evolution in some small way.
19. Being hyperrealistic will help you choose your dreams wisely and then achieve them. Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life